Weekend Project: Twitter Trivia Bot

I had been meaning to try writing a Twitter bot for a while now. I figured a trivia bot would be pretty easy to implement, so I spent some time a couple of weekends to rig one together.

It’s (mostly) working now, the bot is active as triviastorm on Twitter, with a supporting webapp deployed on http://trivia.roytang.net/. The bot tweets out a trivia question once every hour. It will then award points to the first five people who gave the correct answer. The bot will only recognize answers given as a direct reply to the tweet with the question, and only those submitted within the one hour period.

Some technical details:

My scripting language of choice for the past few years has been Python 2.7. I’m using Tweepy to interact with the Twitter API, PyMySQL to connect to the database, and Flask to run the webapp. I haven’t used Flask in some time, but it’s still very straightforward. I actually had a harder time configuring the webapp with mod_wsgi on my host.

The main problem with a trivia system is that you need a large and high-quality set of questions. Right now the bot is using a small trivia set –around a thousand questions I got from a variety of sources. If I want to leave this bot running for a while, I’m going to need a much larger trivia set. However, reviewing and collating the questions is a nontrivial task. Hopefully I can add new questions every so often.